Says the guy whose company was bailed out by the Obama stimulus and currently has a multi-billion dollar government contract pic.twitter.com/1kCxUdGieI
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 26, 2021
w/o auto bailout under Obama, Tesla would not exist today
but ok…. https://t.co/l5Ax7gS23v
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 26, 2021
Elon Musk: Beware! If they can tax a billionaire like me, they can tax you regular people too!
Regular People: We've been paying our taxes this whole time, bro.
— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) October 27, 2021
Vilos Cohaagen lied to you, son. https://t.co/aHJ46YHdrT
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) October 31, 2021
— Jay Kirell (@JasonKirell) October 30, 2021
I don’t think Willard Romney is even a billionaire — just a hundred-millionaire carrying water for his (fiscal) betters:
"Your tax reform won't work because I and all my rich friends will just launder our money to avoid it being spent on social programs."
This is what the GOP sounds like when you strip out all the ethnopopulism. No wonder they cling to Trump so hard. https://t.co/J0aQpB0yiO
— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) October 26, 2021
Are Double Digit Billionaires the New Single Digit Billionaires?
As Musk and Bezos rocket into the hundreds of billions, many in the 10 to 99 billion range are feeling the sting of economic anxiety. And the new Democratic tax plan is only making things worse
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) October 27, 2021
topclimber
Reserved for Baud.
dexwood
Fuck ’em. That is all, over and out.
Leto
Exactly what I thought, and I laughed waaaay too hard at this one.
HinTN
With tumbrels!
Two greats of the b-j lexicon.
HinTN
@topclimber: Where is that damn Turing defying bot?
topclimber
A billionaire here, a billionaire there, pretty soon you are talking about real trouble.
Spanky
When will the NYT Pitchbot go on the road to all the billionaires’ diners to interview them?
burnspbesq
Fuck every billionaire except Tim Cook, who has made millions of people’s lives better.
Peale
@Leto: there was a time when such statements by a CEO would make investors flee the stock.
burnspbesq
@Peale:
Not Tesla. It’s a cult.
Baud
@topclimber:
That’s Lord Baud to you.
Leto
@Peale: like burns said, it’s a cult. Idk, maybe he’ll pull a Jimbo Jones and fly all his cult members to Mars… not free of course. Indentured servitude for 60-70 years, but you know… Mars!
topclimber
@Baud:
I meant the other Baud.
Mathguy
DougJ has been on fire lately. That tweet is **chef’s kiss**.
Raven
@dexwood: No such thing, over OR out!
smith
Hillary got it wrong — the real deplorables are our oligarchs. They know that by propping up fascists in the GQP they will hasten both the end of a democratic form of government here and the end of the earth’s ability to support human life everywhere. Yet they do it anyway. For what? So they won’t have to pay taxes. In other words, to pile more money on top of a massive stack of money that for the most part has already lost any value to them. The money they acquire by not paying taxes is literally worthless: Any extra dollar they accrue will not and cannot make any substantive difference in their lives or the lives of their children or their grandchildren, that’s how much money they already have. It is no more than Monopoly money. They are appallingly, indescribably bad people.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@burnspbesq: Just what we needed – yet another bunch of dimwits carrying water for a megalomaniac, except this one is an actual billionaire instead of a fake one.
dexwood
@Raven: Right you are. Too much Hollywood. Now, I am truly out.
JoyceH
WHAT is with Youngkin and those zip-up fleece vests? He looks like he works at a grocery store.
geg6
DougJ would be the one and only reason to get onto Twitter. I wish we’d have more of his wit here because I won’t partake in Twitter. But if I ever do, he’ll be why.
Ten Bears
Uhhmmm … Mars has 1/6th Earth gravity, no running, no atmosphere, and is about a hundred degrees (F) below zero on a warm day. I’d venture the light of consciousness would dim rather quickly.
You first Elon, put your (mostly other people’s) money where your mouth is …
JPL
@JoyceH: MSM likes it. When Gore did casual they didn’t. sad
JPL
@geg6: you control what you see on twitter. You can follow just a few feeds that you want. The one thing you have to remember is never, ever comment. Reading comments are useless also. It’s almost like don’t feed the gremlins after midnight. just don’t
Raven
@dexwood: Horrywoood! https://youtu.be/j7O-SUEh-54
Baud
FWIW, I’ll preserve the light of consciousness for $100 million tops.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
If the billionaires took all their money out of the stock market and used it to buy art, we’d be living in renaissance Florence. Do these people have any idea how many people would rather be craftsmen and artists than crunching numbers on computers all day?
Except that of course then all the artists would show up the rich.
I’ve been wondering why the wealth of our age seems to show up only in bitcoin and index funds. I’m thinking that with the Internet, if it were in anything else, the proles would be able to show up the elite. So nothing anyone actually makes can be considered valuable, only real estate in certain markets and stocks of your friends’ companies. That way, nobody really rich looks untalented, even though certain tech fools still manage to do so.
DanielsBob
Hey, let’s go trash another planet–soon as we figure out how to breathe and eat there.
Is it time to eat the rich yet?
Bex
@JoyceH: A wolf in fleece clothing.
Another Scott
:-(
Get better soon!
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott:
I blame Doocey.
mrmoshpotato
What the shit does this even mean?
Oh fuck it, and fuck Musk.
Anyway
Halloween OT – hiding upstairs as I ran out of candy!! I bought 2 bags of 100 pieces — Didn’t want to get too much and be stuck with leftover candy.
Steady stream of kids — my street is popular, I guess.
Ruckus
@smith:
You’ve got my vote.
burnspbesq
@mrmoshpotato:
It means Elon grew up reading crap sci-fi.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
And seemingly believing it…
mrmoshpotato
@Another Scott: Shit. Kick COVID’s ass, Jen!
Captain C
@mrmoshpotato: We’ll know he’s serious when he successfully sets up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica or, say, the Gobi Desert, either of which would be much easier than putting one on Mars or even the moon.
Aziz, light!
@Ten Bears: Actually Mars temps reach 70F near the equator, and NASA has recorded a high of 86. Gravity is 0.38 of Earth, not one sixth as on the Moon. That said, I welcome Elon’s relocation to a world with no oxygen and no protection from cosmic radiation. That he imagines it to be a future home for humanity is the stupidest idea on Earth.
Suzanne
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
This is absolutely right. But we subsist on low-quality shit, like particle board furniture and plastic dishes, because we are too tired and busy doing other meaningless shit.
The MAGA people want to return to being a manufacturing economy. It will never happen for a million reasons. But the allure of it was that you could make a pretty good wage with not a whole lot of education. I would like to see the next great economic shift to move us to a creative economy, in which, unlike the manufacturing economy, someone might get a lot of education or training in their creative endeavor. But then get out of these fucken cheap, shitty consumptive patterns that we are in and instead make the world’s best cultural products and durable goods.
Chetan Murthy
More Elon moral imbecility. The imbecile conflates “prevent these people from dying this year” into “solve world hunger”. Moral imbecile.
Elon: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-wants-proof-6-164343999.html
Beasley: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starvation-deaths-billionaires-could-help-fix-it-david-beasley/
John S.
Elon Musk and his fanboys must not pay very close attention to the sci-fi they claim to love so much:
HinTN
@Baud: Test that motherfucker!
Chetan Murthy
@Captain C:
A fully-underground colony, where nobody spends appreciable time aboveground. B/c that’s what a Mars colony will be: fully underground.
mrmoshpotato
@Captain C: Yup, which is why it’s so absurd.
“Mars or bust! Nothing easier!’
tom
@Mathguy: at first glance I thought it was an actual FTFNYT article. DougJ is killing it.
HinTN
@John S.: They think they know what Heinlein meant.
Peale
@Leto: I think this ends with Elon living on a floor of the Bellagio, refusing to cut his finger nails. Except when that’s revealed, the press swoons that “ol’ Elon ‘s still got his edge.”
Hoodie
@mrmoshpotato: It’s the 21st century version of White Flight.
Geminid
I’ve read that some of the tax credits in the bills that will (fingers crossed) pass Tueday will be directed towards unionized car manufacturers. That may be part of why hit-dog Musk is yelping. I guess we’ll have to wait until the bills pass to see if this is so.
I am all for extracting revenue from top “earners” like Musk. But generally speaking, I think the best way to reduce income inequality is to promote a thriving working class. Supporting unionization through government policy and as individuals is a powerful way to do this. If the Teamsters can succeed in unionizing Amazon, that and the resulting effect on other workplaces will do as much or more to reduce income equality as a good wealth tax. And we can have both.
Jeffro
I thought I saw a tweet last week that said, in effect, “billionaires need to understand that the ‘choice’ being put to them isn’t their current low tax rates or paying a few percent more…it’s paying a few percent more, or having their wealth confiscated and their heads put on pikes”
No wait, that was me. That’s what I’m always saying to myself. >(
zhena gogolia
@Mathguy: Oh, yeah!
zhena gogolia
@smith: Yeah. Every time I scream about some NYT story, my husband just says, “They really don’t want to pay those taxes.”
zhena gogolia
@Anyway: Wow. We had one family — a Snow White and a shark. So we’ll be eating Reese’s for a while.
Ksmiami
@topclimber: you mean a really yummy meal Rt? “Billionaires- There what’s for breakfast…”
Professor Bigfoot
Musk’s Mars dream is idiocy.
BUT— what SpaceX are doing with the Starship program is building something far more important— access to low earth orbit.
Microgravity manufacturing, and asteroid mining suddenly become far more cost effective.
It’s really brilliant… almost worth having to listen to that stupid bastard.
Roger Moore
@mrmoshpotato:
It means Musk has been reading too many bad science fiction novels where humanity is wiped off Earth any only our Martian colony survives.
Professor Bigfoot
@Roger Moore: right?
Dumb, really.
But low cost access to LEO will be huge, economically speaking.
Captain C
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, unless the inhabitants want the joys of a full-on all-day, every day radiation bath.
Gin & Tonic
If you’d worked for 50 years, 40 hours a week, earning a million dollars an hour and never spending anything, you’d have less than a third of what Musk has.
Brachiator
What a bunch of dopes. Let them try. Then confiscate the paintings.
BTW, the uber wealthy and wannabees have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. I recently heard a radio commercial offering some scheme where rich people could buy fractional shares of expensive paintings. This sounded nuttier than bitcoin.
I don’t hate the rich or see a need to be excessively punitive. But I am tired of their whiny bullshit.
The fact is that the Trump tax cuts were too generous to business and to upper income individuals. And people and business made big money during and after the pandemic. They are doing well despite supply chain issues. We can raise taxes to pay for needed programs without hurting the economy.
Raven
Grand Slam in the first!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s still fine because it gets the money out of a bank account and circulating again.
Dan B
@burnspbesq: We’ve got a good billionaire, Nick Hanauer. He’s done some TED talks on inequality.
VOR
I remember in 2012 Romney published his taxes. I was paying a higher rate than he was and I didn’t even have a car elevator.
Dan B
@smith: YUvalde Noah Harrari interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 minutes says this generation will be the last homo sapiens, that machine enhanced humans and AI will be captured by billionaires and unavailable to much of humanity. I believe famine, drought, and flood will cause enormous chaos and those robots won’t make themselves.
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
FIFY.
Mike Kimel at BusinessInsider:
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@JPL:
Thanks but I really am aware of all that but am not interested in following anyone on Twitter. I am barely on FB these days and only for close family and friends, who are all, in any case, non-insane and reliably liberal Dems. I’ve also cut back my commenting here, though I am lurking all the time. Really trying to limit social media in my life and, by extension, my Internet cruising, period. I am much happier when I do, I find. Too much depressing stuff (especially the media themselves) and I just need a break.
burnspbesq
@Professor Bigfoot:
Tell it to the last remaining breeding population of ocelots in the USA, whose habitat is being despoiled by SpaceX.
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
Go for it, y’all. Recognize all of those trillions in gains and pay 20 percent to the Feds, plus state.
Suzanne
@geg6: We still need to meet up IRL when everyone is comfortable with social interaction.
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
I worked time and a half overtime a lot over that 50 yrs, does that count?
I’m assuming not because well, I don’t have what he likely spent on food in the last month.
JaySinWa
@Raven: See you in the funny papers.
Six two and even, over and out.
Another Scott
@burnspbesq: Sounds like a plan.
Seriously, I don’t think anyone is demanding that Musk sell his entire 23% stake in Tesla. But clearly something is wrong when his wealth can go up $25B+ in a day and he can pay little or no income tax…
Cheers,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Aziz, light!:
This is a depressingly common take on the left for whatever reason. Mars can be terraformed. Perhaps the technology to do this won’t be available for hundreds or thousands of years but it’s theoretically possible. Besides, humanity needs to spread out beyond Earth if it hopes to survive for as long as possible
Jim, Foolish Literalist
NotMax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
Upkeep is darned expensive, what with constantly having to update all the windows for security purposes.
//
Another Scott
ICYMI, the end of Biden’s press conference in Rome, Italy. WH.gov:
?
Cheers,
Scott.
Tony Gerace
Arrogant white guy who grew up under apartheid in South Africa. Is it too late to send him back there?
Urban Suburbanite
I briefly got sucked into a rabbit hole today reading up on UC Santa Barbara’s blowup involving a proposed dorm that makes Soviet apartment buildings look light and welcoming, and the weird old rich dude demanding this horrible thing while dangling a 200 million donation. Does this (sort of) living caricature of capitalism have any expertise in architecture? Of course not. He made a lot of money under Warren Buffett, so he must be an expert.
And one of the architects working on this project quit, saying it was an offense as a human being and parent.
James E Powell
@Urban Suburbanite:
Kevin Drum has a spirited defense of the dormitory design.
He seems to believe that objections are liberal over-reach.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Mittens has been laundering his money for years, that’s why he wouldn’t release his tax returns.
lowtechcyclist
Yeah, like that’s gonna work. First of all, if they pull their money out of the stock market, that’s selling stocks, IOW realized capital gains, taxable under current law.
Second, suppose you want to convert a billion dollars into paintings. There aren’t that many paintings that anyone would pay tens, let alone hundreds of millions of dollars for. So Billionaire 1 has to buy, say, 20 paintings at $50M each.
Third, whoever’s selling them has a realized, taxable capital gain!
Fourth, by the time you get to the third or fourth billionaire, you’ve pretty much burned through the supply of paintings that anyone would pay eight figures for. This strategy’s gonna go only so far.
Fifth, and if they deal with that by buying them from each other, once again, realized, taxable capital gains!
Next stop for billionaire money: nonfungible tokens, the “we’ll do any crazy shit with our money to keep it away from the taxman” stage, which would of course destroy whatever remaining claim they have that their wealth somehow benefits society as a whole.
Matt
TBH Musk et al don’t even need to go to Mars to save the world – all they need is a spaceship carrying the 500 richest people and an airlock door…